Eric Fischl Quotations

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.

I hate this idea that there are some people who have a right to express their suffering and others who don't, that there are those in this hierarchy of pain who own it more than you do.

I think making art is something where you think you know, you also know you don't know and you hope - all these things are in play all the time. I think it's what makes the excitement of creativity for the artist.

Artists don't really want to be marginalized. They believe that everybody should be able to appreciate the experience that an artist gives them, an experience that connects us to each other in a deep way.

The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don't even know that's something they should be doing.

I think people who make objects like the distance; they're not there when the other person is taking it in.

Connecting to something keeps our empathy alive.

Connecting to another is one of the most important things in the world and you can keep expanding that connection - one person, a family, a community, a country, a society, a culture.

One of the things I love within music and within sports is how often musicians and athletes thank their audience. In the art world, you would never hear that.

Be the holder of your own Nature. It is a joyful responsibility.

Art should create an experience.

There's actually a disdain for the conversation about audience in the art world. Artist to artist, if you say, "What do you think about audience?" they would probably say, "I don't think about audience, I only think about my work," yet the audience is such an important part.

I don't think my work is so much about opening up wounds. I think it's about understanding the nature of the wound. I'm not bleeding on the canvas. I, like most people, have suffered traumatic events. The character of a person's life is determined by the way they deal with those events. I am a creative person and I deal with it creatively.

Artists of my generation were not educated. We were not given the equipment because it was generally believed to be irrelevant.

Abstraction is an esoteric language.

Personally, I never believe an artist saying "I do it for myself" is saying the truth, because why would you go through the trouble of making something that goes out into the world if you didn't care about somebody else seeing it? It's like the difference between those who choose "more comfortably termed entertainment" versus what people think of as the "art life," which is supposedly more monastic or spiritual. I don't believe in those distinctions.

A precision of composition and figuration is what I'm working toward. I've always felt viewers should have an experience without having to ask what the hell is was about.

If you worry about how good the art is, you're never going to make your own art.

What experience has shown me is that it takes your life to become an artist.

The saying "the business of art is different than the purpose of art" makes sense, and what are you going to do about that? You have some obligation to get the work out there, you believe in it enough that it should be out in the public, but of course it goes through a system that takes it pretty far away from the reasons you made them.

Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

Nudity is a problem for Americans. It disrupts our social exchange.

I think of art as a glue, a cultural and social glue. It's one of the means that has served to show us the things we believe in and the things we celebrate; it has served to reinforce our relationship to each other.